Most scientists today believe that various places
on this planet, such as Greenland, the Antarctic, and many other places, have
some very old ice.The ice in these areas
appears to be layered in a very distinctive annual pattern.In fact, this pattern is both visually and chemically recognizable and
extends downward some 4,000 to 5,000 meters.What
happens is that as the snow from a previous year is buried under a new layer of
snow, it is compacted over time with the weight of each additional layer of snow
above it.This compacted snow is called
the “firn” layer. After several meters this layers snowy firn turns into
layers of solid ice (note that 30cm of compacted snow compresses further into
about 10cm of ice). These layers are much thinner on the Antarctic ice cap
as compared to the Greenland ice cap since
Antarctica averages only 5cm of "water equivalent" per year while
Greenland averages over 50cm of water equivalent. 1,2 since these layers
get even thinner as they are buried under more and more snow and ice, due to
compression and lateral flow (see diagram), the thinner layers of the Antarctic
ice cap become much harder to count than those of the Greenland ice cap at an
equivalent depth. So, scientists feel that most accurate historical information
comes from Greenland, although much older ice comes from other drier places.
Still, the ice cores drilled in the Greenland ice cap, such as the American
Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) and the European Greenland Ice Core Project
(GRIP), are felt to be very old indeed - upwards of 160,000 years old. (Back
to Top)

But how, exactly, are these layers counted?Obviously,
at the surface the layers are easy to count visually – and in Greenland the
layers are fairly easily distinguished at depths as great as 1,500 to 2,000m
(see picture).Even here though, there
might be a few problems.How does one
distinguish between a yearly layer and a sub-yearly layer of ice?For instance, it is not only possible but also likely for various large
snowstorms and/or snowdrifts to lay down
multiple layers in a given year.Very
short-term oscillations representing as little as a day or two do show up as
variables in the layers of ice.6Storms
can vary in their temperature patterns.They
can also last a few hours to several days, weeks, or even months.Of course, these storms and other anomalous weather patterns might
present a bit of a problem for the uniformitarian paradigm.Consider the following excerpt from a 1997 issue of the Journal
of Geophysical Research:

“Fundamentally, in counting any annual marker, we must ask whether it is
absolutely unequivocal, or whether nonannual events could mimic or obscure a
year. For the visible strata (and, we believe, for any other annual indicator at
accumulation rates representative of central Greenland), it is almost certain
that variability exists at the subseasonal or storm level, at the annual level,
and for various longer periodicities (2-year, sunspot, etc.). We certainly must
entertain the possibility of misidentifying the deposit of a large storm or a
snow dune as an entire year or missing a weak indication of a summer and thus
picking a 2-year interval as 1 year.”7

Good examples of this phenomenon can be found in areas of very high
precipitation, such as the more coastal regions of Greenland.It was in this area, 17 miles off the east coast of Greenland, that Bob
Cardin and other members of his squadron had to ditch their six P-38’s and two
B-17’s when they ran out of gas in 1942 - the height of WWII.
Many years later, in 1981, several members of this original squad decided
to see if they could recover their aircraft.They
flew back to the spot in Greenland where they thought they would find their
planes buried under
a few feet of snow.To their surprise,
there was nothing there.Not even metal
detectors found anything.After many
years of searching, with better detection equipment, they finally found the
airplanes in 1988 three miles from their original location and under
approximately 260 feet of ice! They went on to actually recovered one of
them (“Glacier Girl” – a P38), which was eventually restored to her former
glory.20

What is most interesting about this story, at least for the purposes of this
discussion, is the depth at which the planes were found (as well as the speed
which the glacier moved).It took only 46
years to bury the planes in over 260 feet (~80 meters) of ice and move them some
3 miles from their original location.This
translates into a little over 5 ½ feet (~1.7 meters) of ice or around 17 feet
(~5 meters) of compact snow per year and about 100 meters of movement per year.In a telephone interview, Bob Cardin was asked how many layers of ice
were above the recovered airplane.He
responded by saying, “Oh, there were many hundreds of layers of ice above the
airplane.”When told that each layer
was supposed to represent one year of time, Bob said, “That is impossible!Each of those layers is a different warm spell – warm, cold, warm,
cold, warm, cold.” 21Also,
the planes did not sink in the ice over time as some have suggested.Their density was less than the ice or snow since they were not filled
with the snow, but remained hollow.They
were in fact buried by the annual snowfall over the course of almost 50 years.

Now obviously, this example does not reflect the actual climate of central
Greenland or of central Antarctica.As a
coastal region, it is exposed to a great deal more storms and other sub-annual
events that produce the 17 feet of annual snow per year.However, even now, large snowstorms also drift over central Greenland.And, in the fairly recent warm Hipsithermal period (~4 degrees warmer
than today) the precipitation over central Greenland, and even Antarctica, was
most likely much greater than it is today.So,
how do scientists distinguish between annual layers and sub-annual layers?Visual methods, by themselves, seem rather limited – especially as the
ice layers get thinner and thinner as one progresses down the column of ice. (Back
to Top)

Well, there are many other methods that scientists use to help them identify
annual layers.One such method is
based on the oxygen isotope variation between 16O and 18O
(and 17O) as they relate to changes in temperature.For instance, water (H2O), with the heavier 18O
isotope, evaporates less rapidly and condenses more readily than water molecules
that incorporate the lighter 16O isotope.Since the 18O requires more energy (warmer weather) to be
evaporated and transported in the atmosphere, more 18O is deposited
in the ice
sheets in the summer than in the winter.Obviously
then, the changing ratios of these oxygen isotopes would clearly distinguish the
annual cycles of summer and winter as well as longer periods of warm and cold
(such as the ice age) – right?Not
quite.One major drawback with this
method is that these oxygen isotopes do not stay put.They diffuse over time.This
is especially true in the “firn layer” of compacted snow before it turns
into ice.So, from the earliest
formation of these ice layers, the ratios of oxygen isotopes as well as other
isotopes are altered by gravitational diffusion and so cannot be used as
reliable markers of annual layers as one moves down the ice core column.One of the evidences given for the reality of this phenomenon is the
significant oxygen isotope enrichment (verses present day atmospheric oxygen
ratios) found in 2,000 year-old-ice from Camp Century, Greenland.3Interestingly enough, this property of isotope diffusion has long been
recognized as a problem.Consider
the following comment made by Fred Hall back in 1989:

“The accumulating firn [ice-snow granules] acts like a giant columnar sieve
through which the gravitational enrichment can be maintained by molecular
diffusion. At a given borehole, the time between the fresh fall of new snow and
its conversion to nascent ice is roughly the height of the firn layers in
[meters] divided by the annual accumulation of new ice in meters per year. This
results in conversion times of centuries for firn layers just inside the Arctic
and Antarctic circles, and millennia for those well inside [the] same. Which is
to say--during these long spans of time, a continuing gas-filtering process is
going on, eliminating any possibility of
using the presence of such gases to count annual layers over thousands of
years.” 4

The short-term peaks of d18O
in the ice sheets have been ascribed to annual summer/winter layering of
snow formed at higher and lower air temperatures. These peaks have
been used for dating the glacier ice, assuming that the sample increments of
ice cores represent the original mean isotopic composition of precipitation,
and that the increments are in a steady-state closed system.

Experimental evidence, however, suggests that this assumption is not valid,
because of dramatic metamorphosis of snow and ice in the ice sheets as a
result of changing temperature and pressure. At very cold Antarctic
sites, the temperature gradients were found to reach 500°C/m, because of
subsurface absorption of Sun radiation. Radiational subsurface melting is
common in Antarctica at locations with summer temperatures below -20°C,
leading to formation of ponds of liquid water, at a depth of about 1 m below
the surface. Other mechanisms are responsible for the existence of liquid
water deep in the cold Antarctic ice, which leads to the presence of vast
sub-sheet lakes of liquid water, covering an area of about 8,000 square
kilometers in inland eastern Antarctica and near Vostok Station, at near
basal temperatures of -4 to -26.2°C. The sub-surface recrystallization,
sublimation, and formation of liquid water and vapor disturb the original
isotopic composition of snow and ice. . .

Important isotopic changes were found experimentally in firn (partially
compacted granular snow that forms the glacier surface) exposed to even 10
times lower thermal gradients. Such changes, which may occur several
times a year, reflecting sunny and overcast periods, would lead to false age
estimates of ice. It is not possible to synchronize the events in the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres, such as, for example, CO2
concentrations in Antarctic and Greenland ice. This is, in part the result
of ascribing short-term stable isotope peaks of hydrogen and oxygen to
annual summer/winter layering of ice. and using them for dating. . .

In the air from firn and ice at Summit, Greenland, deposited during the past
~200 years, the CO2 concentration ranged from 243.3 ppmv to 641.4
ppmv. Such a wide range reflects artifacts caused by sampling or natural
processes in the ice sheet, rather than the variations of CO2
concentration in the atmosphere. Similar or greater range was observed in
other studies of greenhouse gases in polar ice.50

According to Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of
the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland, the ice
core data is not only contaminated by procedural problems, it is also
manipulated in order to fit popular theories of the day.

Jaworowski first argues that ice cores do not fulfill the essential criteria of
a closed system. For example, there is liquid water in ice, which can
dramatically change the chemical composition of the air bubbles trapped between
ice crystals. "Even the coldest Antarctic ice (down to -73°C)
contains liquid water. More than 20 physicochemical processes, mostly related to
the presence of liquid water, contribute to the alteration of the original
chemical composition of the air inclusions in polar ice. . . Even the
composition of air from near-surface snow in Antarctica is different from that
of the atmosphere; the surface snow air was found to be depleted in CO2
by 20 to 50 percent . . ."50

Beyond this, there is the problem of fractionation of gases as the "result
of various solubilities in water (CH4 is 2.8 times more soluble than
N2 in water at O°C; N2O, 55 times; and CO2, 73
times), starts from the formation of snowflakes, which are covered with a film
of supercooled liquid."50

"[Another] one of
these processes is formation of gas hydrates or clathrates. In the highly
compressed deep ice all air bubbles disappear, as under the influence of
pressure the gases change into the solid clathrates, which are tiny crystals
formed by interaction of gas with water molecules. Drilling decompresses cores
excavated from deep ice, and contaminates them with the drilling fluid filling
the borehole. Decompression leads to dense horizontal cracking of cores [see
illustration], by a well known sheeting process. After decompression of
the ice cores, the solid clathrates decompose into a gas form, exploding in the
process as if they were microscopic grenades. In the bubble-free ice the
explosions form a new gas cavities and new cracks. Through these cracks, and
cracks formed by sheeting, a part of gas escapes first into the drilling liquid
which fills the borehole, and then at the surface to the atmospheric air.
Particular gases, CO2, O2 and N2 trapped in the deep cold ice start to form
clathrates, and leave the air bubbles, at different pressures and depth. At the
ice temperature of –15°C
dissociation pressure for N2 is about 100 bars, for O2 75
bars, and for CO2 5 bars. Formation of CO2 clathrates
starts in the ice sheets at about 200 meter depth, and that of O2 and
N2 at 600 to 1000 meters. This leads to depletion of CO2
in the gas trapped in the ice sheets. This is why the records of CO2
concentration in the gas inclusions from deep polar ice show the values lower
than in the contemporary atmosphere, even for the epochs when the global surface
temperature was higher than now."50

No study has yet demonstrated that the content of greenhouse trace gases in
old ice, or even in the interstitial air from recent snow, represents the
atmospheric composition.

The ice core data from various polar sites are not consistent with each
other, and there is a discrepancy between these data and geological climatic
evidence. One such example is the discrepancy between the classic
Antarctic Byrd and the Vostok ice cores, where an important decrease in the
CO2
content in the air bubbles occurred at the same depth of about 500 meters,
but at which the ice age difference by about 16,000 years. In approximately
14,000-year-old part of the Byrd core, a drop in the CO2
concentration of 50 ppmv was observed, but in similarly old ice from the
Vostok core, an increase of 60 ppmv was found. In about 6,000-year-old ice
from Camp Century, Greenland, the CO2
concentration in air bubbles was 420 ppmv, but was 270 ppmv in similarly old
ice from Byrd Antarctica . . .

One can also note that the CO2 concentration in the air bubbles
decreases with the depth of the ice for the entire period between the years
1891 and 1661, not because of any changes in the atmosphere, but along the
increasing pressure gradient, which is probably the result of clathrate
formation, and the fact that the solubility of CO2 increases with
depth.

If this isn't already bad enough, Jaworowski
proceeds to argue that the data, as contaminated as it is, has been manipulated
to fit popular theories of the day.

Until 1985, the published CO2 readings from the air bubbles in
the pre-industrial ice ranged from 160 to about 700 ppmv, and occasionally
even up to 2,450 ppmv. After 1985,
high readings disappeared from the publications!50

Another problem is the notion that lead levels in ice cores
correlate with the increased use of lead by various more and more modern
civilizations such as the Greeks and Romans and then during European and
American industrialization. A potential problem with this notion is Jaworowski's
claim to have "demonstrated that in pre-industrial period the total
flux of lead into the global atmosphere was higher than in the 20th century,
that the atmospheric content of lead is dominated by natural sources, and that
the lead level in humans in Medieval Ages was 10 to 100 times higher than in the
20th century."50 Beyond this potential problem, there is
also the problem of heavy metal contamination of the ice cores during the
drilling process.

Numerous studies on radial distribution of metals in the cores reveal an
excessive contamination of their internal parts by metals present in the drilling
fluid. In these parts of cores from the deep Antarctic, ice
concentrations of zinc and lead were higher by a factor of tens or hundreds
of thousands, than in the contemporary snow at the surface of the ice sheet.
This demonstrates that the ice cores are not a closed system; the heavy
metals from the drilling fluid penetrate into the cores via micro- and
macro-cracks during the drilling and the transportation of the cores to the
surface.50

Professor Jaworowski
summarizes with a most interesting statement:

It is astonishing how credulously the scientific community and the public
have accepted the clearly flawed interpretations of glacier studies as
evidence of anthropogenic increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Further historians can use this case as a warning about how politics can
negatively influence science.50

While this statement is most certainly a scathing rebuke of the scientific
community as it stands, I would argue that Jaworowski doesn't go far
enough. He doesn't consider that the problems he so carefully points as
the basis for his own doubts concerning the basis of global warming may also
pose significant problems for the validity of using ice cores for reliably
assuming the passage of vast spans of time, supposedly recording in the layers
of large ice sheets. (Back
to Top)

So, it seems as though isotope ratios are severely limited if not entirely
worthless as yearly markers for ice core dating beyond a very short period of
time.However, there are several
other dating methods, such as the correlation of impurities in the layers of ice
to known historical events – such as known volcanic eruptions.

After a volcano erupts, the ash and other elements from the eruption fall
out and are washed out of the atmosphere by precipitation.This fallout leaves “tephra” (microscopic shards of glass from the
ash fallout – see picture), sulfuric acid, and other chemicals in the snow and
subsequent ice from that year.Sometimes
the tephra fallout can be specifically matched via physical and chemical
analysis to a known historical eruption.This
analysis begins when electrical conductivity measurements
(ECM) are made along the entire length of the ice core. Increases in electrical
conductivity indicate the presence of increased acid content. When a volcano
erupts, it spews out a great deal of sulfur-rich gases.These are converted in the atmosphere to sulfuric acid aerosols, which
end up in the layers of ice and increase the ECM readings. The higher the
acidity, the better the conduction.Sections
of ice from a region with an acidic spike are then melted and filtered through a
capillary-pore membrane filter. An automated scanning electron microscope (SEM),
equipped for x-ray microanalysis, is used to determine the size, shape and
elemental composition of hundreds of particles on the filter.Cluster analysis, using a multivariate statistical routine that measures
the elemental compositions of sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, potassium,
calcium, titanium and iron, is done to identify the volcanic “signature” of
the tephra particles in the sample. Representative tephra particles are
re-located for photomicrography and more detailed chemical analysis.Then tephra is collected from near the volcanic eruption that may have
produced the fallout in the core and is ground into a fine powder, dispersed in
liquid, and filtered through a capillary-pore membrane. Then automated SEM
and chemical analysis is used on this known tephra sample to find its chemical
signature and compare it with the unknown sample found in the ice core - to see
if there is a match.22

Tephra from several well-known historical volcanoes have been analyzed in this
way.For example, Crater Lake in
Oregon was once a much larger mountain (Mt. Mazama) before it blew up as a
volcano.In the mid-1960s
scientists dated this massive explosion, with the use of radiocarbon dating
methods, at between 6,500 and 7,000 years before present (BP).Then, in 1979, Scientific American published an article about a
pair of sagebrush bark sandals that were found just under the Mazama tephra at
Fort Rock Cave.These sandals were
carbon-14 dated to around 9,000 years BP.Even
thought this date was several thousand years older than expected, the article
went on to say that the bulk of the evidence still put the most likely eruption
date of Mt. Mazama at around 7,000 years BP. 23,24Later, a “direct count” of the layers in the ice core obtained from
Camp Century Greenland put the date of the Mazama tephra at 6,400±110 years BP.23,25Then, at the 16thINQUA conference held June 2003, in
Reno Nevada (attended by over 1,000 scientists studying the Quaternary period),
Kevin M. Scott noted in an abstract that the Mazama Park eruptive period had
been “newly dated at 5,600-5,900 14C yrs BP.”Scott went on to note that this new date “includes collapses and
eruptions previously dated throughout a range of 4,300 to 6,700 14C yrs BP.” 26At this point it should also be noted that the carbon-14 dating method is
being calibrated by the Greenland ice cores, so it is circular to argue that the
Greenland ice core dates have been validated by carbon-14 analysis.26

Another famousvolcano, the
Mediterranean volcano Thera, was so large that it effectively destroyed the
Minoan (Santorini) civilization.This
is thought to have happened in the year 1628 B.C. since tree rings from that
region showed a significant disruption matching that date.Of course, such an anomaly was looked for in the ice cores. As predicted,
layers in the "Dye 3" Greenland ice core showed such a major eruption
in 1645, plus or minus 20 years.This
match was used to confirm or calibrate the ice core data as recently as 2003.

Interestingly enough though, the scientists did not have the budget at
the time to a systematic search throughout the whole ice core for such large
anomalies that would also match a Thera-sized eruption.Now that such detailed searches have been done, many such sulfuric acid
peaks have been found at numerous dates within the 18th, 17th,
16th, 15th, and 14th centuries B.C. 35Beyond this, tephra analyzed from the "1620s" ice core layers
did not match the volcanic material from the Thera volcano.The investigators concluded:

"Although we cannot completely rule out the possibility that two nearly
coincident eruptions, including the Santorini eruption, are responsible for the
1623 BC signal in the GISP ice core, these results very much suggest that the
Santorini eruption is not responsible for this signal. We believe that another
eruption led not only to the 1623 BC ice core signal but also, by correlation,
to the tree-ring signals at 1628/1627 BC." 36

Then, as recently as March of 2004, Pearce et al published a paper
declaring that another volcano, the Aniakchak Volcano in Alaska, was the true
source of the tephra found in the GRIP ice core at the "1645 ± 4 BC
layer." These researchers went on to say that, "The age of the
Minoan eruption of Santorini, however, remains unresolved." 37

So, here we have a clearly erroneous match between a volcanic eruption and both
tree rings and ice core signals. What is most curious, however, is that
many scientists still declare that ice cores are solidly confirmed by such
means. Beyond this, as flexible as the dating here seems to be, the Mt.
Mazama and Thera eruptions are still about the oldest eruptions that can be
identified in the Greenland ice cores.There
are two reasons for this.One
reason is that below 10,000 layers or so in the ice core the ice becomes too
alkaline to reliably identify the acid spikes associated with volcanic
eruptions.5 Another reason is that the great majority of volcanic
eruptions throughout history were not able to get very much tephra into the
Greenland ice sheet.So, the great
majority of volcanic signals are detected via their acid signal alone.

This presents a problem.A review
of four eruption chronologies constructed since 1970 illustrate this problem
quite nicely.In 1970, Lamb
published an eruption chronology for the years 1500 to 1969.The work recorded 380 known historical eruptions.Ten years later, Hirschboek published a revised eruption chronology that
recorded 4,796 eruptions for the same period – a very significant increase
from Lamb’s figure.One year
later, in 1981, Simkin et al. raised the figure to 7,664 eruptions and
Newhall et al. increased the number further a year later to 7,713.It is also interesting to note that Simkin et al. recorded 3,018
eruptions between 1900 and 1969, but only 11 eruptions were recorded from
between 1 and 100 AD.So obviously,
as one goes back through recent history, the number of known volcanic eruptions
drops off dramatically, though they were most certainly still occurring – just
without documentation.Based on
current rates of volcanic activity, an expected eruption rate for the past
several thousand years comes to around 30,000 eruptions per 1,000 years.25

With such a high rate of volcanic activity, to include many rather large
volcanoes, how are scientists so certain that a given acid spike on ECM is so
clearly representative of any particular volcano – especially when the
volcanic eruption in question happened more than one or two thousand years ago?The odds that at least one volcanic signal will be found in an ice core
within a very small “range of error” around any supposed historical eruption
are extremely good - even for large volcanoes.Really, is this all too far from a self-fulfilling prophecy?How then can the claim be made that historical eruptions validate the
dating of ice cores to any significant degree?

“The desire to link such phenomena [volcanic eruptions] and the
stretching of the dating frameworks involved is an attractive but
questionable practice.All
such attempts to link (and hence infer associations between) historic
eruptions and environmental phenomena and human "impacts", rely
on the accurate and precise association in time of the two events. . . A
more general investigation of eruption chronologies constructed since 1970
suggest that such associations are frequently unreliable when based on
eruption data gathered earlier than the twentieth century.” 25

So, if volcanic markers are generally unreliable and completely useless beyond a
few thousand years, how are scientists so sure that their ice core dating
methods are meaningful?Well, one of the
most popular methods used to distinguish annual layers is one that measures the
fluctuations in ice core dust.Dust is
alkaline and shows up as a low ECM reading.During
the dry northern summer, dust particles from Arctic Canada and the coastal
regions of Greenland are carried by wind currents and are deposited on the
Greenland ice sheet.During the winter,
this area is not so dusty, so less dust is deposited during the winter as
compared to the summer.This annual
fluctuation of dust is thought to be the most reliable of all the methods for
the marking of the annual cycle - especially as the layers start to get thinner
and thinner as one moves down the column of ice.27 And, it certainly
would be one of the most reliable methods if it were not for one little problem
known as “post-depositional particle migration”.

Zdanowicz et al., from the University of New Hampshire, did real time studies of
modern atmospheric dust deposition in the 1990’s on the Penny Ice Cap, Baffin
Island, Arctic Canada.Their findings are
most interesting indeed:

“After the snow deposition on polar ice sheets, not all the chemical
species preserve the original concentration values in the ice.In order to obtain reliable past-environmental information by firn
and ice cores, it is important to understand how post-depositional effects
can alter the chemical composition of the ice.These effects can happen both in the most superficial layers and in
the deep ice.In the snow surface,
post-depositional effects are mainly due to re-emission in the atmosphere
and we show here that chloride, nitrate, methane-sulphonic acid (MSA) and
H2O2 [hydrogen peroxide] are greatly affected by
this process; moreover, we show how the mean annual snow accumulation rate
influences the re-emission extent.In
the deep ice, post-depositional effects are mainly due to movement of
acidic species and it is interesting to note the behavior of some
substances (e.g. chloride and nitrate) in acidic (high concentrations of
volcanic acid gases) and alkaline (high dust content) ice layers . . . We
failed to identify any consistent relationship between dust concentration
or size distribution, and ionic chemistry or snowpack stratigraphy.” 28

This study goes on to reveal that each yearly cycle is marked not by one
distinct annual dust concentration as is normally assumed when counting ice core
layers, but by two distinct dust concentration peaks – one in late
winter-spring and another one in the late summer-fall.So, each year is initially marked by “two seasonal maxima of dust
deposition.”By itself, this finding
cuts in half those ice core dates that assume that each year is marked by only
one distinct deposition of dust.This
would still be a salvageable problem if the dust actually stayed put once it was
deposited in the snow.But, it does not
stay put – it moves!

“While some dust peaks are found to be associated with ice layers or Na
[sodium] enhancements, others are not.Similarly,
variations of the NMD [number mean diameter – a parameter for
quantifying relative changes in particle size] and beta cannot be
systematically correlated to stratigraphic features of the snowpack.This lack of consistency indicates that microparticles are
remobilized by meltwater in such a way that seasonal (and stratigraphic)
differences are obscured.” 28

This remobilization of the microparticles of dust in the snow was found to
affect both fine and coarse particles in an uneven way.The resulting “dust profiles” displayed “considerable structure and
variability with multiple well-defined peaks” for any given yearly deposit of
snow.The authors hypothesized that this
variability was most likely caused by a combination of factors to include
“variations of snow accumulation or summer melt and numerous ice layers acting
as physical obstacles against particle migration in the snow.”The authors suggest that this migration of dust and other elements limits
the resolution of these methods to “multiannual to decadal averages”.28

Another interesting thing about the dust found in the layers of ice is that
those layers representing the last “ice age” contain a whole lot of dust –
up to 100 times more dust than is deposited on average today.19 The
question is, how does one explain a hundred times as much Ice Age dust in the
Greenland icecap with gradualistic, wet conditions?There simply are no unique dust sources on Earth to account for 100 times
more dust during the 100,000 years of the Ice Age, particularly when this Ice
Age was thought to be associated with a large amount of precipitation/rain –
which would only cleanse the atmosphere more effectively.How can high levels of precipitation be associated with an extremely
dusty atmosphere for such a long period of time?Isn’t this a contradiction from a uniformitarian perspective?Perhaps a more recent catastrophic model has greater explanatory value?

Other dating methods, such as 14C, 36Cl and other
radiometric dating methods are subject to this same problem of post-depositional
diffusion as well as contamination – especially when the summer melt sends
water percolating through the tens and hundreds of layers found in the snowy
firn before the snow turns to ice.Then,
even after the snow turns to ice, diffusion is still a big problem for these
molecules.They simply do not stay put.

More recent publications by Rempel et al., in Nature
(May, 2001),32 also quoted by J.W. Wettlaufer (University of
Washington) in a paper entitled, "Premelting and anomalous diffusion in
ancient ice",31 suggest that chemicals that have been trapped in
ancient glacial or polar ice can move substantial distances within the ice (up
to 50cm even in deeper ice where layers get as thin as 3 or 4 millimeters). Such
mobility is felt by these scientists to be "large enough to offset the
resolution at which the core was examined and alter the interpretation of the
ice-core record." What happens is that, "Substances that are climate
signatures - from sea salt to sulfuric acid - travel through the frozen mass
along microscopic channels of liquid water between individual ice crystals, away
from the ice on which they were deposited. The movement becomes more pronounced
over time as the flow of ice carries the substances deeper within the ice sheet,
where it is warmer and there is more liquid water between ice crystals. . . The
Vostok core from Antarctica, which goes back 450,000 years, contains even
greater displacement [as compared to the Greenland ice cores] because of the
greater depth."That means that past
analyses of historic climate changes gleaned from ice core samples might not be
all that accurate. Wettlaufer specifically notes that, "The point of the
paper is to suggest that the ice core community go back and redo the
chemistry."31,32 Of course these scientists do not think that
such problems are significant enough to destroy the usefulness of ice cores as a
fairly reliable means of determining historical climate changes. But, it does
make one start to wonder how much confidence one can actually have in the
popular interpretations of what ancient ice really means. (Back
to Top)

To add to the problems inherent in ice core dating is the significant amount
evidence that the world was a much warmer place just a few thousand years ago.These higher temperatures of the Middle Holocene or Hypsithermal period
are said to have begun about 9,000 years ago and then started to fade
about 4,000 years ago.8,53

So, how
"warm" was this warm period? Various studies suggest sustained
temperatures of northerly regions, such as the Canadian Northwest Territories,
of 3-4°C warmer than today.
Studies on sedimentary cores carried out in the North Atlantic between Hudson
Strait and Cape Hatteras indicate ocean temperatures of 18°C (verses about 8°C
today in this region).54 However, not all regions experienced the
same increase in temperature and the overall average global temperature is
thought to have been about 2°C warmer than it is today.55

It
also seems that in the fairly recent past the vegetation zones were much closer to
the poles than they are today.The
remains of some plant species can be found as far as 1,000 km farther north than
they are found today.Forests once
extended right up to the Barents Coast and the White Sea.The European tundra zones were non-existent.In northern Asia, peat-moss was discovered on Novaya Zemlya.And, this was no short-term aberration in the weather. This warming trend
seems to have lasted for quite a while.56Consider
also the very interesting suggestion of Prof. Borisov, a long time meteorology and climatology
professor at Leningrad State University:

“During the last 18,000 years, the warming was particularly
appreciable during the Middle Holocene. This covered the time period of
9,000 to 2,500 years ago and culminated about 6,000 to 4,000 years ago,
i.e., when the first pyramids were already being built in Egypt . . . The
most perturbing questions of the stage under consideration are: Was the
Arctic Basin iceless during the culmination of the optimum?”8

Professor Borisov asks a very interesting question.What would happen to the ice sheets during several thousand years of a
“hypsithermal” warming if it really was some 2°C warmer than it is today?If the Arctic region around the entire globe, to include the Arctic
Ocean, was ice free during just a few thousand years, even episodically during
the summer months, what would have happened to the ice sheet on Greenland?

Consider what would happen if the entire Arctic Ocean went without ice during
the summer months owing to a warmer and therefore longer spring, summer, and fall.Certainly there would be more snowfall, but this would not be enough to
prevent the warm rainfall from removing the snow cover and the ice itself from
Greenland’s ice sheet.A marine climate
would create a more temperate environment because water vapor over the Arctic
region would act as a greenhouse gas, holding the day’s heat within the
atmosphere.

Borisov goes on to point out that a 1°C increase in average global temperature
results in a more dramatic increase in temperature at the poles and extreme
latitudes than it does at the equator and more tropical zones.For example, between the years 1890 and 1940, there was a 1°C degree
increase in the average global temperature.During
this same time the mean annual temperature in the Arctic basin rose 7°C.This change was reflected more in warmer winters than in warmer summers.For instance, the December temperature rose almost 17°C while the summer
temperature changed hardly at all.Likewise,
the average winter temperature for Spitsbergen and Greenland rose between 6 to
13°C during this time. 8 Along these same
lines, an interesting article published in the journal Nature 30-years
ago by R. L. Newson showed that, without the Arctic ice cap, the winters of the
Arctic Ocean would rise 20-40ºC and 10-20ºC
over northern Siberia and Alaska - all other factors being equal11M. Warshaw
and R. Rapp published similar results in the Journal of Applied Meteorology
- using a different circulation model.12

Of
course, the real question here is, would a 2°C
increase in average global temperature, over today's "global warming"
temperatures, melt the ice sheets of Greenland or even
Antarctica?

Borisov argued that this idea is not all that far-fetched.He notes that measurements carried out on Greenland’s northeastern
glaciers as far back as the early 1950’s showed that they were loosing ice far
faster than it was being formed. 8The
northeastern glaciers were in fact in “ablation” as a result of just a 1°C
rise in average global temperature. What would be expected from another 2°C
rise? - over the course of several thousand years?

Since that time research done by Carl Boggild of the Geological Survey of
Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), involving data from a network of 10 automatic
monitoring stations, showed that the large portions of the Greenland ice sheet
are melting up to 10 times faster that earlier research had indicated.

In 2000, research indicated that the Greenland ice was melting at a conservative
estimate of just over 50 cubic kilometers of ice per year. However, studies done
by a team from the University of Texas over 18 months from 2005 to 2006 with the
use of gravity data collected by satellites, suggests that the "ice cap may
be melting three times faster than indicated by previous measurements" from
1997 to 2003. Currently, the ice is melting at 239 cubic kilometers per
year (measured from April 2002 to November 2005).52

Greenland covers
2,175,590 square kilometers with about 85% of that area covered by ice of about 2
km thick. That's about 4,351,180 cubic kilometers of ice. At current rates
of melting, it would take about 18,000 years to melt all the ice on
Greenland. Of course, 18,000 years seems well outside the range of the
Hypsithermal period. However, even at current temperatures, the melt rate
of the Earth's glaciers, to include those of Greenland, is accelerating
dramatically - and we still have another
2°C to go. Towns
in Greenland are already beginning to sink because of the
melting permafrost. Even potatoes are starting to grow in Greenland. This has
never happened before in the memory of those who have lived there all their
lives.

In April of 2000, Lars Smedsrud and Tore Furevik wrote in an article in the
Cicerone magazine, published by the Norwegian Climate Research Centre (CICERO)
that , "If the melting of the ice, both in thickness and surface area, does
not slow, then it is an established fact that the arctic ice will disappear
during this century." This is based on the fact that the Arctic ice has
thinned by some 40% between the years 1980 and 2000. This past summer, December
2006, explorers Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen made a very dangerous and most
interesting trek to the North Pole. As they approached the Pole they found
open water, a lot of icy slush, and ice so thin it wouldn't support their
weight.

"We
expected to see the ice get better, get flatter, as we got closer to the
pole. But the ice was busted up," Dupre said. "As we got closer to
the pole, we had to paddle our canoes more and more."51

Walt Meier, a researcher at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in
Boulder, Colorado commented on these interesting findings noting that the
melting of the Arctic ice cap in summer - is progressing more rapidly than
satellite images alone have shown. Given resent data such as this, climate
researchers at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in California predict the
complete absence of summer ice on the Arctic Ocean by 2030 or
sooner.51 That prediction is dramatically different than what
scientists were predicting just a few years ago - that the ice would still be
there by the end of the century. Consider how a complete loss of Arctic
ice and with an average temperature increase over the Arctic Ocean upwards of 20-40ºC
would affect the temperature of surrounding regions - like Greenland.
Could Greenland long retain its ice without the Arctic polar ice?

If
this is not convincing enough, consider that since
the year 2000, glaciers around the world have continued melting at greater and
greater rates - exponentially greater rates. Alaska's glaciers are receding at
twice the rate previously thought, according to a new study published in July
19, 2002 Science journal. Around the globe, sea level is about 6 inches
higher than it was just 100 years ago, and the rate of rise is increasing quite
dramatically. Leading glaciologist, Dr. Mark Meier, remarked in February of 2002
that the accepted estimates of sea level rise were underestimated, due to the
rapid retreat of mountain glaciers.44

The next year, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
meeting in San Francisco on February 25, 2001, Professor Lonnie Thompson, from
Ohio State University's Department of Geological Sciences, presented a paper
entitled, "Disappearing Glaciers - Evidence of a Rapidly Changing
Earth." Dr. Thompson has completed 37
expeditions since 1978 to collect and study perhaps the world's largest archive
of glacial ice cored from the Himalayas, Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, the Andes
in South America, the Antarctic and Greenland.

Prof. Thompson reported to AAAS that at least one-third of
the massive ice field on top of Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro has melted in only
the past twelve years. Further, since the first mapping of the mountain's ice in
1912, the ice field has shrunk by 82%. By 2015, there will be no more
"snows of Kilimanjaro."In Peru, the
Quelccaya ice cap in the Southern Andes Mountains is at least 20% smaller than
it was in 1963. One of the main glaciers there, Qori Kalis, has been melting at
the astonishing rate of 1.3 feet per day. Back in 1963, the glacier covered 56
square kilometers. By 2000, it was down to less than 44 square kilometers and
now there is a new ten acre lake. It's melt rate has been increasing
exponentially and at its current rate will be entirely gone between 2010 and
2015, the same time that Kilimanjaro dries.

The exponential nature of this worldwide melt is dramatically illustrated by
aerial photographs taken of various glaciers. A series of photographs of the
Qori Kalis glacier in Peru are available from 1963. Between 1963 and 1978 the
rate of melt was 4.9 meters per year. Between 1978 and 1983 was 8 meters per
year. This increased to 14 meters per year by 1993 and to 30 meters per year by
1995, to 49 meters per year by 1998 and to a shocking 155 meters per year by
2000. By 2001 it was up to about 200 meters per year. That's almost 2 feet per
day. Dr. Thompson exclaimed, "You can literally sit there and watch it
retreat."

Then, in 2001, NASA scientists published a major study, based on satellite and
aircraft observations, showing that large portions of the Greenland ice sheet,
especially around its margins, were thinning at a rate of roughly 1 meter per
year. Other scientists, such as Carl Boggild and his team, have recorded
thinning Greenland glaciers at rates as fast a 10 or even 12 meters per year.
It is quite a shock to scientists to realize that the data from satellite images
shows that various Greenland glaciers are thinning and retreating in an
exponential manner - by an "astounding" 150 meters in thickness in
just the last 15 years.43

In
both 2002 and 2003, the Northern Hemisphere registered record low ocean ice
cover. NASA's satellite data show the Arctic region warmed more during the 1990s
than during the 1980s, with Arctic Sea ice now melting by up to 15 percent per
decade. Satellite images show the ice cap covering the Northern pole has been
shrinking by 10 percent per decade over the past 25 years.45

On the opposite end of the globe, sea ice floating near Antarctica has shrunk by
some 20 percent since 1950. One of the world's largest icebergs, named B-15,
that measured near 10,000 square kilometers (4,000 square miles) or half the
size of New Jersey, calved off the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. The Larsen Ice
Shelf has largely disintegrated within the last decade, shrinking to 40 percent
of its previously stable size.45 Then, in 2002, the Larsen B ice
shelf collapsed. Almost immediately after, researchers observed that nearby
glaciers started flowing a whole lot faster - up to 8 times faster! This marked
increase in glacial flow also resulted in dramatic drops in glacial elevations,
lowering them by as much as 38 meters (124 feet) in just 6 months.48

Scientists monitoring a glacier in Greenland, the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier, have
found that it is moving into the sea 3 times faster than just 10 years ago.
Measurements taken in 1988 and in 1996 show the glacier was moving at a rate of
between 3.1 and 3.7 miles per year. The latest measurements, taken the summer of
2005, showed that it is now moving at 8.7 miles a year. Satellite measurements
of the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier show that, as well as moving more rapidly, the
glacier's boundary is shrinking dramatically. Kangerdlugssuaq is about 1,000
meters (3,280ft) thick, about 4.5 miles wide, extends for more than 20 miles
into the ice sheet and drains about 4 per cent of the ice from the Greenland ice
sheet. The realization of the rapid melting of such a massive glacier, which was
fairly stable until quite recently, came as quite a shock to the scientific
community. Professor Hamilton expressed this general surprise in the following
comment:

"This is a dramatic discovery. There is concern that the acceleration
of this and similar glaciers and the associated discharge of ice is not
described in current ice-sheet models of the effects of climate change.
These new results suggest the loss of ice from the Greenland ice sheet,
unless balanced by an equivalent increase in snowfall, could be larger and
faster than previously estimated. As the warming trend migrates north,
glaciers at higher latitudes in Greenland might also respond in the same
way as Kangerdlugssuaq glacier. In turn, that could have serious
implications for the rate of sea-level rise."46

The exponential increase in glacial speed is now thought to be due to increased
surface melting. The liquid water formed on the surface during summer melts
collects into large lakes. The water pressure generated by these surface lakes
forces water down through the icy layers
all the way to the underlying bedrock. It then spreads out, lifting up the
glacier off the bedrock on a lubricating film of liquid water. Obviously, with
such lubrication, the glacier can then flow at a much faster rate -
exponentially faster. This increase in speed also makes for a thinner glacier
since the glacier becomes more stretched out.46

For example the giant Jakobshavn glacier - at four miles wide and 1,000 feet
thick the biggest on the landmass of Greenland - is now moving towards the sea
at a rate of 113 feet a year; the "normal" annual speed of a glacier
is just one foot. Until now, scientists believed the ice sheet would take 1,000
years to melt entirely, but Ian Howat, who is working with Professor Tulaczyk,
says the new developments could "easily" cut this time "in
half". 49
Again, this is well within the range of what would have been melted during
Hypsithermal warming many times over.

It
seems that no one predicted this. No one thought it possible and scientists are
quite shocked by these facts. The amazingly fast rate of glacial retreat simply
goes against the all prevailing models of glacial development and change, change
which
generally involve many thousands of years. Who would have thought that such
changes could happen in mere decades?

Beyond this, there are many other evidences of a much warmer climate in
Greenland and the Arctic basin in the fairly recent past.For example, when Greenland’s seas were 10 meters higher than they are
today (during the last hipsithermal), warm water mollusks can be found
that live over 500 to 750 miles farther south today.Also, the remains of land vertebrates, such as various reptiles, are
found in Denmark and Scandinavia, when they live only in Mediterranean areas
today.13

“Additional evidence is given by...peats and relics in Greenland--the
northern limits may have been displaced northward through several degrees
of latitude...and [by] other plants in Novaya Zemlya, and by peat and ripe
fruit stones [fruit pits]...in Spitsbergen that no longer ripen in these
northern lands. Various plants were more generally distributed in
Ellesmere [Island and] birch grew more widely in Iceland....” 13

The point is that these types of plants and these types of large trees should
never be able to grow on islands north of the Arctic Circle.Back in 1962 Ivan T. Sanderson noted that , “Pieces of large tree
trunks of the types [found] . . . do not and cannot live at those latitudes
today for purely biological reasons.The
same goes for huge areas of Siberia.”14Also, as previously noted, fruit does not ripen during short autumns at
these high latitudes.Therefore, the
spring and summer seasons had to be much longer for any seeds from these
temperate trees to germinate and grow.Likewise,
the peats that have been found on Greenland require temperate, humid climates to
form. Peat formation requires climates that allow for the partial decomposition
of vegetable remains under conditions of deficient drainage.13Also, peat formations require at least 40 inches of rainfall a year and a
mean temperature above 32°F. 15In
addition, there were temperate forests on the Seward Peninsula, in Alaska, and
the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, in Canada’s frigid Inuvik Region, facing the
Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean and at Dubawnt Lake, in Canada’s frozen
Keewatin Region, west of the Hudson Bay.16And yet, somehow, it is believed that Greenland’s icecap survived
several thousand years in such a recently temperate climate, but how?

What we have are temperate forests and warm waters near and within the Arctic
Circle and Ocean all across the northern boundary from Siberia to Norway and
from Alaska to the Hudson Bay.These
temperate conditions existed for thousands of years both east and west of
Greenland and at all the Greenland latitudes around the world - and these
conditions had not yet ended by the time the Egyptians were building their
pyramids!This, of course, would explain
why mammoths and other large animals were able to live, during this period,
throughout these northerly regions. (Back
to Top)

Mammoths are
especially interesting since millions of them recently lived (within the last
10-20 thousand years according to mainstream science) well within the Arctic
Circle. Although popularly portrayed as living in cold barren environments and
occasionally dying in local events, such as mudslides or entrapment in soft
riverbanks, the evidence may actually paint a very different picture if studied
at from a different perspective.

The well
preserved "mummified" remains of many mammoths have been found along
with those of many other types of warmer weather animals such as the horse,
lion, tiger, leopard, bear, antelope, camel, reindeer, giant beaver, musk sheep,
musk ox, donkey, ibex, badger, fox, wolverine, voles, squirrels, bison, rabbit
and lynx as well as a host of temperate plants are still being found all jumbled
together within the Artic Circle - along the same latitudes as Greenland all
around the globe.39

The problem with the popular belief that millions of mammoths lived in very
northerly regions around the entire globe, with estimates of up to 5 million
living along a 600 mile stretch of Siberian coastline alone,39 is
that these mammoths were still living in these regions within the past 10,000 to
20,000 years. Carbon 14 dating of Siberian mammoths has returned dates as early
as 9670± 40 years before present (BP).41 An even more recent
study (1995) carried out on mammoth remains located on Wrangel
Island (on the border of the East-Siberian and Chukchi Seas) showed that woolly
mammoths persisted on Wrangel Island in the mid-Holocene, from 7390-3730 years
ago (i.e., till about ~2,000 B.C.)57

So,
why is this a problem?

Contrary to popular imagination, these creatures were not surrounded by the
extremely cold, harsh environments that exist in these northerly regions today.
Rather, they lived in rather lush steppe-type conditions to include evidence of
large fruit bearing trees, abundant grasslands, and the very large numbers and
types of grazing animals already mentioned only to be quickly and collectively
annihilated over huge areas by rapid weather changes. Clearly, the present is
far far different than even the relatively recent past must have been. Sound too
far fetched?

Consider that the last meal of the famous Berezovka mammoth (see picture above), found
north of the Artic Circle, consisted of "twenty-four pounds of undigested
vegetation" 39 to include over 40 types of plants; many no
longer found in such northerly regions.43 The enormous quantities of
food it takes to feed an elephant of this size (~300kg per day) is, by itself,
very good evidence for a much different climate in these regions than exists
today.39 Consider the following comment by Zazula et. al. published
the June 2003 issue of Nature:

"This vegetation [Beringia: Includes an area between Siberia and Alaska
as well as the Yukon Territory of Canada] was unlike that found in modern
Arctic tundra, which can sustain relatively few mammals, but was instead a
productive ecosystem of dry grassland that resembled extant subarctic steppe
communities . . .

[This region] must have been covered with vegetation even during the coldest
part of the most recent ice age (some 24,000 years ago) because it supported
large populations of woolly mammoth, horses, bison and other mammals during
a time of extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." 42

Now, does it really make sense for this region to be so warm, all year round,
while the same latitudes on other parts of the globe where covered with
extensive glaciers?
Siberia, Alaska and Northern Europe and parts of northwestern Canada were all
toasty warm while much of the remaining North American Continent and Greenland
were covered with huge glaciers? Really?

Beyond
this, consider that the mammoths didn't have hair erector muscles that enable an animal's fur
to be "fluffed-up", creating insulating air pockets. They also lacked
oil glands to protect against wetness and increased heat loss in extremely cold
and damp environments. Animals currently living in Arctic regions have both oil
glands and erector muscles. Of course, the mammoth did have a certain number of
cold weather adaptations compared to its living cousins, the elephants; such as
smaller ears, trunk and tail, fine woolly under-fur and long outer
"protective" hair, and a thick layer of insulating fat,39
but these would by no means be enough to survive in the extremes of cold, ice
and snow found in these same regions today - not to mention the lack of an adequate
food supply.It seems very much as
Sir Henry Howorth concluded back in the late 19th century:

"The instances of the soft parts of the great pachyderms being
preserved are not mere local and sporadic ones, but they form a long chain
of examples along the whole length of Siberia, from the Urals to the land of
the Chukchis [the Bering Strait], so that we
have to do here with a condition of things which prevails, and with
meteorological conditions that extend over a continent.

When we find such a series ranging so widely preserved in the same perfect
way, and all evidencing a sudden change of climate from a comparatively
temperate one to one of great rigour, we cannot help concluding that they
all bear witness to a common event. We cannot postulate a separate climate
cataclysm for each individual case and each individual locality, but we are
forced to the conclusion that the now permanently frozen zone in Asia became
frozen at the same time from the same cause."40

Actually, northern portions of Asia, Europe, and North America contain the
remains of extinct species of the elephant [mammoth] and rhinoceros, together
with those of horses, oxen, deer, and other large quadrupeds.39 Even
though the evidence speaks against the "instant" catastrophic event
freeze that some have suggested,39 the weather change was still a
real and relatively sudden change to a much colder and much harsher environment
compared to the relatively temperate and abundant conditions that once existed
in these northerly regions around much of the globe. Is
it not then a least reasonable to hypothesize that Greenland also had such a
temperate climate in the resent past, loosing its icecap completely and growing
lush vegetation?If not, how was the
Greenland ice sheet able to be so resistant to the temperate climate surrounding
it on all sides for hundreds much less thousands of years? (Back
to Top)

Interestingly enough, crushed plant parts have been found in the ice sheets of
northeastern Greenland – from a dike ridge of a glacier.This silty plant material was said to give off a powerful odor, like that
of decaying organic matter.17 This material was examined for fossils
by Esa Hyyppa of the Geological Survey of Finland, who noted the following:

“The
silt examined contained two whole leaves, several leaf fragments and two
fruits of Dryas octopetala; [also] a small, partly decayed leaf of a shrub
species not definitely determinable . . . and an abundance of much
decayed, small fragments of plant tissues, mostly leaf veins and root
hairs . . . " 17

It is most Interesting that scientists think that this plant material must have
originated from some superficial deposit in a distant valley floor of Greenland
and that this material was squeezed up from the base of the ice.
Some scientists have even suggested that, “The modern aspect of the
flora precludes a preglacial time of origin for it.” 17Note also that the northeastern corner of Greenland is actually its
coldest region.It has a “continental
climate that is remote from the influence of the sea.” 18The ocean dramatically affects climate.That
is why regions like the north central portions of the United States have such
long, cold winters when compared to equal latitudes along the eastern seaboard.Northeastern Greenland, therefore, would have the coldest climate of the
entire island.

Also, consider that just this past July of 2004, plant material
consisting of probable grass or pine needles and bark was discovered at the
bottom of the Greenland ice sheet under about 10,400 feet of ice. Although
thought to be several million years old, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a professor
at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute and NGRIP project leader
noted that the such plant material found under about 10,400 feet of ice
indicates the
Greenland Ice Sheet "formed very fast."38

Beyond the
obvious fact that such types of organic material suggest an extremely rapid
climactic change and burial by ice, the question is, Why hasn't such organic
material been stripped completely off Greenland by now by the flowing ice
sheets? For instance, we know how fast these ice sheets move - up to 100 meters
per year in central regions and up to 10 miles per year for several of
Greenland's major glaciers. Given several hundred thousand to over a few million
years of such scrubbing by moving ice sheets, how could significant amounts of
such organic material remain on the surface of Greenland?

In just the last 100 years Glacier National Park has
gone from having over 150 glaciers to just 35 today. And, those that remain have
already lost over 90% of the volume that they had 100 years ago. "For
instance, the Qori Kalis Glacier in Peru is shrinking at a rate of 200 meters
per year, 40 times as fast as in 1978 when the rate was only 5 meters per year.
And, it's just one of the hundreds of glaciers that are vanishing.

Ice is also disappearing from the Arctic Ocean and Greenland at an astounding rate that
has taken scientists completely off guard. More than a hundred species of animals
have
been spotted moving to more northerly regions than they usually occupy.
Many kinds of temperate plants are also growing much farther north and at higher
elevations. Given all of these surprising rapid turn of events, even mainstream
scientists are presenting some rather interesting scenarios as to what will
happen to massive ice sheets like that found on Greenland in the near future. In some scenarios, the ice on
Greenland eventually melts, causing sea levels to rise some 18 feet (~6 meters). Melt just the
West Antarctic ice sheet as well, and sea levels jump another 18 feet.34
The speed of glacial demise is only recently being appreciated by scientists who
are "stunned" to realize that glaciers all around the world, like
those of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Himalayas just beneath Mt. Everest, the high
Andes, Swiss Alps, and even Iceland, will be completely gone within just 30
years.33 The same thing happened to the Langjokull Ice Cap, in
Iceland, during the Hypsithermal based on benthic diatom data. "Langjokull
must have disappeared in the early Holocene for such a diverse, benthic
dominated diatom assemblage to flourish."58 It's about to
happen again.

Of course, this begs the question as to how the ice sheets on Greenland and
elsewhere, which are currently melting much faster than they are forming with
just a 1°C rise in global temperature, could have survived for several thousand
years during the very
recent Hypsithermal period when global temperatures were another 2°C degrees warmer than today
and temperatures within the Arctic Circle were between 20
and 40ºC warmer?

First glance intuition is often very helpful in coming up with a good hypothesis
to explain a given phenomenon, such as the hundreds of thousands of layers of
ice found in places like Greenland and Antarctica.It seems down right intuitive that each layer found in these ice sheets
should represent an annual cycle.After
all, this seems to fit the uniformitarian paradigm so well.However, a closer inspection of the data seems to favor a much more
recent and catastrophic model of ice sheet formation.Violent weather disturbances with large storms, a sudden cold snap, and
high precipitation rates could very reasonably give rise to all the layers, dust
bands, and isotope variations etc. that we find in the various ice sheets today.

So, which hypothesis carries more predictive power? Is there more evidence
for a much warmer climate all around Greenland in the recent past or for the
survival of the Greenland Ice sheet, without melting, for hundreds of thousands
to millions of years? Both positions cannot be right. One of them
has to be wrong. Can all the frozen temperate plants and animals within
the Arctic Circle trump interpretation of ocean core sediments, coral dating,
radiometric dating, sedimentation rate extrapolations, isotope matches between
ocean and ice cores and Milankovitch cycles? Most scientists don't think
so. Personally, I don't see why not? For me, the evidence of
warm-weather animals and plants living all around Greenland around the entire
Arctic Circle, is especially overwhelming.

The
following is from an E-mail exchange with
C. Leroy Ellenberger, best known as a one-time advocate, but now a
prolific critic of controversial writer/catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky. My
response follows:

July
26, 2007:

Talbott STILL does not GET IT concerning the ability of
the ice at high altitude at the summit of the Greenland ice cap to have
survived the global warming that occurred during the Hypsithermal period. Just
because it was six or so degrees warmer at sea level during that time DOES
NOT AUTOMATICALLY mean that it was six degrees warmer at the high altitude
at Greenland's summit, due to adiabatic cooling; or even if it were six
degrees warmer at the summit does not mean that the summer temperature
necessarily got above freezing. AS I said in July 1994, we can
ski Hawaii and Chile even while the folks at sea level are basking almost
naked in the sun. And besides, the cores contain NO INDICATION
that such wholesale melting, draining away untold number of annual layers,
has even happened at the summit of Greenland in the past 110,000 years. Period. As
Paul Simon sez in "The Boxer": "The man hears what he wants
to hear and disregards the rest." That is Dave Talbott,
"clueless in the mythosphere".

I would also like to point out what Robert Grumbine told
me earlier today: if, say, 10,000 annual layers were melted, as Talbott
would like to believe, then it would have been impossible for Bob Bass to
get the high correlation he did between the signals in ice core profiles and
Milankovitch cycles.

__________

Leroy

High altitude doesn't seem to be a helpful
argument when it comes to explaining the preservation of Greenland Ice
sheets during the thousands of years (6-7kyr) of Hypsithermal
(Middle Holocene) warming. Why? Because what supports the high
altitude of the ice in Greenland? Obviously, it is the ice itself.

I mean really, note that the altitude
of the ice sheet in Greenland is about 2,135 meters. Now, consider that
about 2,000 meters of this altitude is made up of the thickness of the
ice itself. If you warm up this region so that the lower altitudes
start to melt, the edges are going to start receding at a rate that is
faster than the replacement of the total ice lost. In short, the
total volume of the ice will decrease and the ice sheet will become
thinner as it flows peripherally. This will reduce the altitude of
the ice sheet and increase the total amount of surface area exposed to
the warmer temperatures. This cycle will only increase over the time of
increased warmness.

Consider this in the light of what is
happening to the ice sheet in Greenland today with only a one degree
increase in the average global temperature over the past 100 years or
so. Currently, the ice is melting at 239 cubic kilometers per year
(measured from April 2002 to November 2005). And, we aren't yet
close to the average global warmness thought to have been sustained
during the Hypsithermal (another 3 to 5 degrees warmer). If that's
not a problem I don't know what is? But, as you pointed out,
"A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." -
but I suppose you are immune to this sort of human bias?

As far as Milankovitch Cycles and the
fine degree of correlation achieved, ever hear of "tuning"?
If not, perhaps it might be interesting to look into just a
bit. Milankovitch cycles seem, to me at least, to have
a few other rather significant problems as well.

While
your logic is unassailable, it is based on a false premise concerning how
much warming occurred during the mid-Holocene Hypsithermal
period. (1) Contrary to what you and Charles Ginenthal claim
(coincidentally or not), there was no ca. 5 degree rise in average global
temperature during the Hypsithermal, more generally known as the Atlantic
period, from ca. 6000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. This 5 degrees is a
figure that was derived for the rise in temperature in Europe, according to
the source cited by Ginenthal. The consensus among climatologists
is that the average global rise in temperature in the Hypsithermal/Atlantic
period was about one degree, which we are seeing now. (2)
However, regardless what the temperature rise might have been, another line
of evidence contradicts your and Ginenthal's position. The hundreds of
sediment cores extracted from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean indicate that
during the past 70,000 years the Arctic Ocean has never been ice free and
therefore never warm enough for all the melting you, Ginenthal, and Talbott
claim allegedly happened. I urge you to read Mewhinney's Part 2
of "Minds in Ablation" and see if your dissertation on ancient ice
does not need some revision or dismantling. It would appear that
Dave Talbott's gloating in his email to this list at Thu, 26 Jul 3007
20:20:19-0400 (EDT), was not only premature, but totally unjustified.

Richard Alley [author of The
Two Mile Time Machine] received my email while he was en route to
Greenland, but he took the time to send the following reply, for which I am
most grateful and which is above my request:
"Modelers such as P. Huybrechts have looked into
this. In the models, there exist solutions in which somewhat smaller and
steeper ice sheets are stable; warming causes melting back of the margins
but not enough melting across the cold top of the ice sheet to generate
abundant meltwater runoff. Averaged over the last few decades, iceberg
calving has removed about half of the snow accumulation on Greenland, and
melting the other half. Warming causing retreat would pull the ice largely
or completely out of the ocean, thus reducing or eliminating the loss by
calving; without losing icebergs, less snowfall is required to maintain the
ice sheet, so stability is possible with more melting. Too much warming and
the ice sheet no longer has a steady solution. The model results
shown in our review paper are relevant." - Alley, R.B., P.U. Clark, P.
Huybrechts and I. Joughin. Ice-sheet and sea-level changes. Science
310: 456-460 (2005).

On 7/26/07 8:17 PM, "Leroy Ellenberger"

______

Dear
Leroy,

I
appreciate your response.It seems to me though that
you are now simply throwing out anything that comes to mind to see if it
will fly. First you argue that the altitude of
Greenland would preserve the ice sheet in a warm environment for thousands
of years.But, now that you see that this argument is
untenable, you have now decided that it must not have been that warm
during the Hypsithermal?

I've
read through Mewhinney's "Minds in Ablation" several times now
in my consideration of this topic. To be frank, I
don't see where Mewhinney convincingly deals with the topic of the
Hypsithermal warm period.For example, you argue that
there was only a significant rise in temperature (relative to today) in
Europe. Beyond this, you suggest that the overall
average global temperature during the Hypsithermal was about the same as
the average global temperature today.

Well,
it seems to me like there are at least a few potential problems here.The first problem is that even at current global temperatures, the
Greenland Ice sheet is in ablation at a rate that would easily melt it
well within the time frame of the Hypsithermal period - several times
over.Also, the notion that only Europe
experienced significantly increased temperatures doesn't seem to gel quite
right with the available facts.

Harvey
Nichols, back in the late 60s, published a study of the history of the
"Canadian Boreal forest-tundra ecotone". This study
"suggested that the arctic tree-line had moved northwards 350 to 400
km beyond its modern position (extending soils evidence collected by
Irving and Larsen, in Bryson et al. 1965, ref. 6) during the mid-Holocene
warm period, the Hypsithermal. The climatic control of the modern arctic
tree-line indicated that prolonged summer temperature anomalies of ~ + 3
to 4 C were necessary for this gigantic northward shift of the tree-line,
thus fulfilling Budyko's temperature requirement for the melting of Arctic
Ocean summer ice pack. A more extensive peat stratigraphic and
palynological study (Nichols, 1975, ref. 7) confirmed and extended the
study throughout much of the Canadian Northwest Territories of Keewatin
and Mackenzie, with a paleo-temperature graph based on fossil pollen and
peat and timber macrofossil analyses. This solidified the concept of a
+3.5 to 4 degree (+/- 0.5) C summer warming, compared to modern values,
for the Hypsithermal episode 3500 BP back at least to 7000 before present,
again suggesting that by Budyko's (1966) calculations there should have
been widespread summer loss of Arctic Ocean pack ice. By this time J.C.
Ritchie and F. K. Hare (1971, ref.8) had also reported timber macrofossils
from the far northwest of Canada's tundra from even earlier in the
Hypsithermal."

These
"warm" features are not limited to Canada or Europe, but can be
seen around the entire Arctic Circle. Large trees
as well as fruit bearing trees and peat bogs, all of which have been dated
as being no older than a few tens of thousands of years, are found along
the northern most coasts of Russia, Canada, and Europe - often well within
the boundaries of the Arctic Circle. Millions of
Wholly Mammoth along with horse, lion, tiger, leopard, bear, antelope,
camel, reindeer, giant beaver, musk sheep, musk ox, donkey, ibex, badger,
fox, wolverine, voles, squirrels, bison, rabbit and lynx as well as a host
of temperate plants are still being found all jumbled together within the
Artic Circle - along the same latitudes as Greenland all around the
globe. Again, the remains of many of these plants
and animals date within a few tens of thousands of years ago. Yet, their
presence required much warmer conditions within the Arctic Circle than
exist today - as explained by Nichols above.

And,
this problem isn't limited to the Hypsithermal period. Speaking of the
area between Siberia and Alaska as well as the Yukon Territory of Canada
Zazula et al said, "[This region] must have been covered with
vegetation even during the coldest part of the most recent ice age (some
24,000 years ago) because it supported large populations of woolly
mammoth, horses, bison and other mammals during a time of extensive
Northern Hemisphere glaciation."

I
don't get it?Was it much warmer than today all the way
around the Arctic Circle, everywhere, and still cold in Greenland? How is such a feat achieved?

As
far as your "other lines of evidence" they all seem shaky to me
in comparison to the overwhelming evidence of warm-weather plants and
animals living within the Arctic Circle within the last 20kyr or so.

The
patterns of sedimentary cores are, by the way, subject to the very
subjective process of "tuning" - as noted in my essay on
Milankovitch Theory.

Richard
Alley's argument that smaller "steeper" ice sheets are more
stable during warm periods doesn't make any sense to me. Ice sheets flow.They don't remain
"steep" or all humped up like Half-Dome. To significantly
increase the "steepness" or "slope" of the Greenland
ice sheet, the overall size of the sheet would have to be reduced from
over 2,000,000 square kilometers to just a few thousand
to make a significant difference in the overall "steepness" of
the Greenland ice sheet.

Even
today the Greenland ice is melting quite rapidly across most of "the
top" as well as the sides. It is also
melting in such a way that the surface meltwater percolates down through
the entire ice sheet to create vast lakes at the bottom - lubricating the
ice sheet and making it flow even faster. Just
because it doesn't reach the ocean before it melts and turns into water
doesn't mean that less ice is melting than before - i.e., just because it
is flowing as liquid water instead of "calving" into the ocean.

No,
I'm afraid you, Mewhinney, and Alley have a long way to go to explain some
of these interesting problems - at least to my own satisfaction. It seems like you all accept certain interpretations based on a
limited data set while failing to seriously consider a significant amount
of evidence that seems to fundamentally counter your position in a very
convincing manner.

Thanks
again for your thoughts. I did find them very interesting.

Sean

Next
Response:

Dear Sean,

You raise a
many points here in your rejoinder, some of which distort what I wrote. I
have neither the resources nor the time to explore all the points you
raise, if indeed they need to be explored considering Jim Oberg's remark
to Warner Sizemore in a late 1978 letter about not needing to chase every
hare Velikovsky set loose to know that Worlds in Collision is bogus. And
for all the points you raise, many of them interesting about exotic Arctic
conditions and so forth, you do not, as I see it, come to grips with the
testimony from the Arctic Ocean sediment cores which indicate that body of
water has never been ice free in the past 70,000 years, as would be the
case if climate were as warm as you claim. This has to be a boundary
condition on your speculations despite all the
botanical and faunal activity in the Arctic during that time.

Sure, the
Pleistocene and early Holocene were interesting environments whose
conditions we have difficulty understanding and doubly so as we project
our own experiences on that extinct epoch. AS an example of a
distortion of what I wrote, I did not claim Europe was the only area that
warmed five degrees during the Hypsithermal, merely that it was the area
mentioned in the source Ginenthal used to justify his claim of a global
warming that large. As for the demise of the Pleistocene
megafauna that seems to interest you so much, I can do no better that R.
Dale Guthrie's Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe (U. Chi. Press, 1990)
and William White's three part critique in Kronos XI: 1-3 which focusses
on the extragant claims made over the years about the catastrophic demise
and preservation of the frozen mammoths. White was rebutting my defense of
the Sanderson-Velikovsky school of mammoth extinction earlier in Kronos. Oh
yes, and do not forget William R. Farrand's 1961 classic "Frozen
Mammoths and Modern Geology", SCIENCE 133, 729-35. I leave
you with the closing quote of my previous email: "Mundus vult decipi
ergo decipiatur".

Sincerely, C. Leroy Ellenberger

________________

Dear Leroy,

If you aren't interested in seriously
considering some of the main points I've raised, that's up to you. It
is just that so far I haven't seen anyone present any significantly
cogent arguments against the evidence for a very warm and iceless
Arctic Circle and Ocean in the recent past.

You say I've not considered the evidence
of the ocean cores, but I have considered this evidence. It is
just that your interpretation of the ocean sediment cores seems to fly
in the face of the overwhelming interpretation of the existence of
warm-weather animal and plant life within the entire Arctic Circle
in the recent past. Both interpretations simply can't be right.
One has to win out over the other. It all boils down to which
perspective carries with it the greatest degree of predictive
power. Consider this in the light of the following interpretation of
ocean cores take from the Barents Sea ( i.e., part of the Arctic
Ocean):

"Marine
sediment cores [taken in the Barents Sea] representing the
entire Holocene yielded foraminifera which showed that a temperature
optimum (the early Hypsithermal) developed between 7800 and 6800 BP,
registering prolonged seasonal (summer) ice free
conditions, and progressing to 3700 BP with temperatures similar to
those of today, after which a relatively abrupt cooling
occurred." [emphasis mine]

So, there you have it. How then can you
argue that ocean core sediments conclusively support your
contention that the Arctic Ocean has "never been ice free
for the past 70,000 years"? Now, is that really true? - given
the above reference?

Also, I don't see that it matters what
killed off the mammoths for the purposes of this discussion -
catastrophic or otherwise. That has nothing to do with the fact that
these creatures and many others lived in lush warm environments for a
long period of time above and around the significant majority of
the Arctic Circle in the recent past. This is an
overwhelming fact with an equally overwhelming conclusion that makes
it very hard to imagine how Greenland could have remained frozen the
whole time.

If you have something as far as real
evidence or a reasonable explanation, I'd be quite interested.
Otherwise, I'm not into a discussion that is mostly about who can list
off the most pejoratives. That might be fun, but I'm really not up for
that sort of thing . . .

And
the ultimate argument -- it doesn't make sense to Pitman. Yet even
though he quotes Alley's argument, he doesn't see the effect. Half the
ice that is lost from Greenland today is lost by calving of iceberge.
Icebergs aren't meltwater. Meltwater is the other half of
the mass loss.

The size of the ice sheet depends on the balance between income
(accumulation) and outgo (melting, iceberg calving). No iceberg
calving halves the outgo, letting the income side win out until the ice
sheet gets so large that it starts calving again.

Ice sheets do indeed flow. What Pitman has missed is covered
well in the Paterson reference I made earlier. Namely, the flow
rate depends on the temperture of the ice. Colder ice doesn't flow
as fast as warm. A second feature he missed is that ice is an excellent
insulater. It takes time for warmer conditions at the surface to warm
the temperatures in the interior of the ice sheet. Enough time
that parts of the Greenland ice sheet still 'remember' glacial maximum
temperatures. Much more of the sheet would have remembered the
glacial maximum conditions several kya than currently do so, and the ice
would have been correspondingly stiffer, leading to more steeply-sloped
sides.

All the preceding, though, is aside. The real point is that in
talking about the Greenland ice sheets' melting away during the
hypisthermal, Pitman is making a _prediction_, not an observation. Yet
he and some others are taking his prediction as observed fact. The
preceding merely sheds a little light on what quality of prediction he
made.

More to the point is that if he were engaging in science, the
thing he'd do following his prediction of the obliteration of the
Greenland
ice sheet is look for evidence that it had actually happened. Forests
and mammoths don't show obliteration of ice sheets, so all that is
irrelevant except as clues to what motivated the prediction.

One good way of determining that Greenland had melted away is to
find those extra 6 meters of sea level that it represents. Yet, in
fact, the sea levels are higher now than any time in the last ~100 ky,
including during the hypsithermal.

In the second note:

The Barents sea today is ice-free in the summer, yet there is a
perennial Arctic sea ice pack. It was also ice free -- in summer
-- during the 'little ice age'. The Barents sea is marginal for
sea ice packs, so doesn't carry a perennial ice cover. William
Chapman, at the University of Illinois, has a nice web site on sea ice
conditions called 'the cryosphere today'. The National Snow and
Ice Data Center carries more data, some Scandanavian records back
several centuries included.

Robert Grumbine

_____________

Robert,

Thank you for your thoughts. However,
they still don't seem to solve the problem - as I understand it anyway.

You present the seemingly obvious argument
that the total ice lost from the Greenland ice sheet is the result of
half melting and half calving. Obviously then, if the ice melts to
a point where there is no more calving, half the loss is removed and the
accumulation rate can keep up.

Superficially this seems like an obvious
conclusion. The problem here is that this argument does not take into
account the etiology of calving - i.e., the flow of ice all the way to
the ocean. If the ice sheet melts to such an extent that it no
longer reaches the ocean, the ice sheet itself would have to be quite
thin. Thick ice creates a lot of pressure on itself and flows over
time at a rate that is fast enough to reach the ocean before it melts.
The ice isn't going to be cold enough to make it "stiff"
enough so that it doesn't flow at at least its current rate of flow
(contrary to your suggestion). Also, the flow rate is only going to be
increased over the current rate with increased areas of surface melting.
This is due to the increased lubrication of the ice sheet from the
percolation of liquid water from the surface to the base of the ice
sheet.

Also, the ice sheet isn't going to get much
"steeper" than it already is. Why not? Because the
thickness of the Greenland ice sheet is about 2 km, but around 1500 x
1500 km (2,175,590 sq km) in surface area. How does one create a
relatively "steep" ice sheet unless the ice sheet one is
thinking about is less than a few tens of km in maximum diameter?

In short, it seems to me that it is the flow
rate that is key, not the calving rate. Ice is lost at the flow
rate regardless of the calving rate. Therefore, if the melting of
the ice is so great that the flow rate cannot keep up in a way that
allows calving into the ocean, this does not indicate a
"halving" of the rate at which ice is lost from the sheet
at all. It simply indicates that the flow rate cannot keep up with
the increased melt rate. At this point the ice sheet would have
become so thin that a much greater surface area would be exposed to
summer melt - dramatically increasing the average yearly loss of ice as
well as the flow rate (due to the lubrication effect).

This sort of thing is already happening
today. In the illustration below, note the significant increase in the
area of summer melt in Greenland between 1992 and 2005, contributing to
about 240 cubic kilometers of ice lost, per year, by 2005.

This feature will only be enhanced as the
Arctic region continues to warm - still well shy of the warmth
experienced in this region during the thousands of years of the Hypsithermal.
Pretty soon the entire sheet will be subject to summer melting. I'm
sorry, but this increased melt rate over the entire sheet isn't going to
be overcome by a decline in calving rate. That just doesn't
happen. There simply is no example of such a thing as far as I am aware.
But, I'd be very interested in any reference of such an observation or
model to the contrary.

Also, the notion that the Arctic Ocean was
covered with ice during the Hypsithermal is significantly undermined by
current melt rates of the Arctic Ocean ice. At current rates the
ice will be pretty much gone well within 50 years (see figure below).
In fact, some, like Walt Meier, a researcher at the U.S. National Snow
and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, commented on these interesting
findings notes that the melting of the Arctic ice cap in summer is
progressing more rapidly than satellite images alone have shown. Given
recent data such as this, climate researchers at the U.S. Naval
Postgraduate School in California predict the complete absence of summer
ice on the Arctic Ocean by 2030 or sooner.

That's only about 20 years away. And
you think all the evidence that the Hypsithermal was even warmer within
the entire Arctic region isn't enough to suspect that the Arctic Ocean
was probably ice free then as well as it is going to be in very short
order today? It stretches one's credulity to think otherwise -
does it not? Yet, you argue that forests, mammoths, peat bogs, and
warm-water forams are "irrelevant" to this question - even
when they appear within the Arctic Circle? Really?

Thanks for your efforts though. But, I
must say . . . I for one still don't "get it".

Consider also that fairly recent evidence
has come to light that mammoths survived on Wrangel Island (located on
the border of the East-Siberian and Chukchi Seas) until 2,000 B.C.
That's right. This is no joke.

Robert
Grumbine presented an interesting challenge: "One good way
of determining that Greenland had melted away is to find those extra 6
meters of sea level that it represents. Yet, in fact, the sea levels
are higher now than any time in the last ~100 ky, including during the
hypsithermal."

Well,
as it turns out, this observation has been made and reported by several
scientists, to include NguyÔn V¨n B¸ch, Ph¹m
ViÖt Nga of the institute of Oceanography, NCNST. These authors
report the following findings:

The
study results of depositional environments provide with informations to
reconstruct the sea-level positions in the last 6,000 years. Here, it
must be admitted that in the time of 6,000 years or so before present in
Tr­êng Sa region, the sea-level was higher than the present by 5 - 6m.
That's why several coral reefs have the top surfaces of 5m in height.
Nowadays, the most of scientific works touching upon Holocene sea-level
changes support the conclusion that the sea-level was at +5m dated 6,000
years BP [1, 6]. Thus, in Tr­êng Sa Sea for the last 6,000 years BP
sea-level has moved up and down 4 times (Fig.6) in a drop trend. The
curve in Fig.6 is deduced from the study results of sedimentary sequence
and stratigraphic, pollen-spores, chemical analysis and sedimentary
basin analysis.

Obliterating
Greenland is a matter of global sea level, not merely local, so let's see [whether]
the paper is about global sea level: . . .

Worse,
w.r.t. Pitman's cherry-picking, is that the same paper does include global
sea level curves which do show that global sea level has not been several
meters greater than present any time in the past 10ky (one stops there, the
one that goes farther back shows no such higher sea level for the past 125
ky -- its limit).

Not content to cherry-pick only a single local curve, it also turns
out that he cherry-picked _which_ local curve. Figure 3 shows (and
labels it so) Regional Sea Level curve, one curve for 'data scattered along
the Vietnamese coast', and one for the Hoang So area. The latter accord with
the global curve and aren't mentioned by Pitman. Fig 4 shows a curve for the
Malaysia peninsula, which shows less sea level change than the scattered
Vietnamese stations (4 m peak, vs the 5-6 Pitman quotes for the Vietnamese
-- someone unknowledgeable but curious about the science would wonder why
there were such very large differences over such small areas 0, 4, 5 meters
in three nearby areas).

The authors, even in translation, are clear about what they were doing
and what they found. They found some interesting features in their
local area. What they did not do, or attempt, or challenge, was to
construct a global sea level curve. What's interesting, for their
work, is that while global sea level was flat the last 6 ky, their area has
been oscillating up and down.

Robert Grumbine

_______________

Robert,

And that's the whole point.
"Global" sea level curves for the Holocene seem to be
extrapolations from regional sea level curves - curves that can vary
widely with all kinds of theories as to the reasons for the regional
differences. Some argue that:

"The probability
is strong that mid-Holocene eustatic sea level was briefly a meter or
two higher than the present sea level, although separating isostatic
and eustatic effects remains an impediment to conclusively
demonstrating how much global ice volume was reduced. . .

In summary, when
relative sea-level records are reconstructed from paleoclimatological
methods, all coastlines exemplify to one degree or another the complex
processes confronting inhabitants of coastlines of Scandinavia,
Chesapeake Bay, and Louisiana. Multiple processes can cause observed
sea-level changes along any and all coastlines and uncertainty remains
when attributing cause to reconstructed sea-level trends. Only through
additional relative sea-level records (including sorely needed records
from the LGM and early deglaciation), better glaciological budgets,
and improved geophysical and glacial models will the many factors that
control sea-level change be fully decoupled."

This hardly sounds to me like conclusive
science - something upon which one can make very definitive negative or
positive statements concerning the likely melt or non-melt of
Greenland's ice. There's just not sufficient positive or negative
predictive power. In short, its seems rather difficult to use such
evidence, "cherry pick" if you will, and pretty much ignore
the very strong evidence for a much warmer Arctic in the recent past
than exists today - and the implications of this evidence for the
survival of the Greenland ice sheet for thousands of years.

Additional comment:Current
concepts of late Pleistocene sea level history, generally referred to
the 14C time scale, differ considerably1. Some
authors2,3 assume that the sea level at about 30,000 BP was
comparable with that of the present and others4,5 assume a
considerably lower sea level at that time. We have now obtained 14C
dates from in situ roots and peat which indicate that the sea
level was lowered eustaticly to at least 40−60 m
below the present level between 36,000 and 10,000 BP. The sea level
rose from -13 m to about +5 m from 8,000 to 4,000 BP and
then approached its present level. [emphasis added]